Question

I am trying to work on a home project so I can get some practice working on WPF & WCF applications. Can anyone give out suggestions on a sample WPF and or WCF applications that I can develop?

Answer 1

A project I was thinking about was to help regulate my teenage son’s internet usage.

Windows has a UI-based tool to control logon times. A WPF front-end would be nice to duplicate or improve on that tool, but use it to set network usage times. This way, kids could do school work (not prohibited from logging on their computer) but not be distracted by facebook.

The WCF portion would be a WCF service on your computer and WCF client on the kids’ computers. The kids’ computers would periodically check for restriction updates. If network access is current OFF, then the client (on the kids’ computer) would turn off the network adapters (both ethernet and Wifi), turn them on every few minutes to check for updates, then turn them off again.

Just define a data contract for whatever structure/class you want to represent usage, and the service would have an operation contract with a single call, like:

[ServiceContract]
interface INetworkControl
{
    [OperationContract]
    NetworkRestriction GetNetworkRestriction();
}

Maybe it would need more; that would be up to you (i.e., pass the computer name as a parameter, or perhaps logged on user if you wanted to control by user, who knows).